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The genetics of learning disabilities.

Rapid progress in the study of learning disabilities requires a common context within which investigators and professionals with very diverse backgrounds can work towards common goals. Much evidence points to the heterogeneity of origin and clinical expression of learning disabilities as well as to many other ways in which they resemble such multifactorial conditions as mental retardation, gout and hypertension. In these conditions, genetic and epidemiological methods have been used to sort out the constitutional and environmental factors which precipitate disease in susceptible persons. Such an approach to learning disabilities can be expected to be rewarding.

Dyslexia

Social skills deficits as a primary learning disability.

Advances in the definition of social skills deficits in children and youth with learning disabilities are presented and critiqued. The proposed modified definition of learning disability by the Interagency Committee on Learning Disabilities, which includes social skills deficits as a specific learning disability, is presented and discussed. This definition is analyzed from primary, secondary, and social learning theory causative hypotheses. Development of an adequate assessment technology is viewed as critical to the identification and classification of social skills deficits in children and youth with learning disabilities.

Government Agencies

Instructional and curricular requisites of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities.

The successful integration of students with learning disabilities into mainstream reading classes may require teachers to adapt instruction and curricula in major ways. In this article, we discuss the relation between the instruction prescribed by standardized commercial curricula and the reading achievement of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities and other low-performing nonhandicapped students. An instructional template designed to complement commercially published reading lessons is described and its effects on the reading achievement of mainstreamed students with learning disabilities examined. Next, the limitations of generic instructional procedures to rectify the deficiencies of mainstream curricular programs for students with greater-than-average instructional needs are reviewed. We conclude with a discussion of the complexity of educating instructively needy learners in mainstream settings and the significance of well-designed instruction.

Achievement

Pharmacists' knowledge and attitudes regarding monitoring the behaviors of children with learning disabilities.

The attitudes and knowledge of pharmacists in Nebraska regarding children's learning disabilities were surveyed by questionnaire. One hundred thirty-three pharmacists responded. The results were analyzed according to type of practice (community, chain and hospital) and age (20--30 years, 31--40 years, 41--50 years, and 51 years and over). The results indicate that pharmacists are being asked about learning disabilities. Overall, 53% of the pharmacists responding had been asked about learning disabilities by parents, physicians, teachers or others. No significant interactions were found between the type of practice and age, and no significant main effect for type of practice was found in the ANOVA results for knowledge scores or attitude scores. Even though there were no differences owing to age in pharmacists' knowledge of learning disabilities, age was found to have a significant effect on attitudes toward increased pharmacist involvement in monitoring behaviors of learning-disabled children; the younger groups had a more positive attitude. The pharmacist seems to have the knowledge and attitudes required to become more actively involved in monitoring the medications and behaviors of children with learning disabilities.

Adult

Mainstream Experiences for Learning Disabled students (Project MELD): preliminary report.

Mainstream Experiences for the Learning Disabled (MELD) was developed to accommodate students with learning disabilities in the mainstream. This article reports the progress of 13 students at the end of 1 year of planning and 1 year of implementing the MELD model in one urban elementary school. Observational and school adjustment data from the implementation year suggest that although the MELD model was not fully incorporated into the mainstream classes, students with learning disabilities adjusted well to a less individualized and more demanding mainstream program. They came to school regularly, did not present serious behavior problems, and spent as much of reading class and more of math class on task as they had in special education. These students in the mainstream were assigned more opportunities to work with text materials rather than workbooks in reading and spent significantly more reading time in teacher-directed lessions. Nevertheless, the students made no significant progress in reading or math and earned lower grades during the implementation year. The authors suggest that students with learning disabilities will not succeed in the mainstream if teachers continue "business as usual" in mainstream classes.

Achievement

Toward a scientific pedagogy of learning disabilities: a sameness in the message.

The development of a scientific pedagogy of learning disabilities as called for by Kirk and Bateman (1962) requires the rendering of a science of learning disabilities and a pedagogy derived from that science. But such a pedagogy is necessarily incomplete if it fails to recognize that the structure of the curriculum significantly shapes the act of teaching students identified as learning disabled. The current thinking about curricula is that the universe of information that a curriculum program comprises need only be organized around subject area topics (e.g., mathematics, reading, language arts, science, social studies) and hierarchically arranged in a scope and sequence that has as its main characteristic the general ordering of skills from simple to complex. For all practical purposes, information is viewed as raw material (Kaufman et al., 1990) that can be nominally organized and readily packaged. The information is then consumed as curriculum that requires little or no transformation of its form or structure. The articles in this series of the Journal of Learning Disabilities provide examples of how transforming information by identifying and developing curricula around structural samenesses can lead to a pedagogy that is efficient and effective. The development of a scientific pedagogy of learning disabilities requires that the field acknowledge the importance of curriculum structure and the complexity of information. The field must also examine the intricacies of designing curricula with the same kind of commitment and passion it has demonstrated in the last 30 years in investigating the etiology and organic basis of learning disabilities.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Achievement

A descriptive study of adults with suspected learning disabilities.

This article documents a descriptive study of 80 adults considered to have learning disabilities. The study was initiated by the Language and Learning Disabled Adults Task Force in London, Ontario, for the purpose of developing a profile of the self-perceived characteristics and needs of the adult population with learning disabilities in Southwestern Ontario. The study also served as a vehicle for implementation of the Intake Questionnaire, an instrument with potential as a screening device for service agencies working with adults with learning disabilities. A self-referred and agency-referred sample of 80 adults completed the Intake Questionnaire. Data were collected in the areas of demography, education, employment, health, and psychosocial characteristics, aspirations, and cooperation with further testing. Results describe people with ongoing specific problems in education, employment, and psychosocial functioning who aspire to learn more about themselves and their learning disabilities.

Achievement

Methodological issues and learning disabilities diagnosis in clinical populations.

Previous research suggests that the diagnosis of a comorbid learning disability is dependent on the method used for making the LD diagnosis. This study investigated that proposition by studying the effects of using three approaches to the assessment of learning disabilities in a sample of 177 six- to thirteen-year-old boys referred to outpatient mental health clinics for behavior problems. The use of these three procedures to diagnose comorbid learning problems produced significantly different results. All methods identified significant numbers of children in the clinical population as learning disabled; however, each method identified children with differing characteristics. Consistent with predictions from measurement theory, the commonly used simple standard score discrepancy method was more likely to identify children with above-average IQs as learning disabled, whereas a regression approach identified learning disabilities more consistently across the ability range. These results were interpreted as supporting the use of regression approaches to diagnose co-occurring learning disabilities, as that method is less likely to be biased by the child's intelligence test score. The implications of the use of each method in research investigations is also discussed.

Adolescent

Immediate recall fo semantically varied "sentences" by learning-disabled adolescents.

The immediate recall of 20 semantically and syntactically varied sentences was assessed and compared for 30 learning-disabled and 30 academically achieving adolescents. Learning-disabled adolescents repeated significantly fewer of the sentences verbatim than their achieving age peers. They exhibited significant reductions in the recall of sentences which violated semantic (selectional) rules, contained correctly and incorrectly sequenced modifier-strings, contained a random word-setting, or were syntactically complex. Perseveration errors occured more frequently among the learning-disabled adolescents than among the achievers and inter-sentence perseverative errors were exhibited only by those who were learning disabled. The rank order of difficulty for the sentences agreed for the two groups, suggesting primarily quantitative reductions in the immediate recall by the learning-disabled adolescents. The findings suggest that learning-disabled adolescents depend heavily upon semantic aspects for language processing, experience immediate memory and sequencing problems for modifier-strings, and exhibit a prevalence of interfering perseverative responses.

Adolescent

Tactile discrimination, response mode, and interhemispheric communication by learning disabled children.

32 right-handed, learning disabled children aged 8-10 yr., 11-13 yr., and 14-16 yr. were presented a tactile discrimination task. Pairs of fabrics of different or the same texture were presented to the same hand (uncrossed condition) or alternating hands (crossed condition). Discrimination errors were compared using a verbal response mode and a nonverbal response mode. Analysis indicated that the number of crossed errors was significantly greater in the verbal response mode than in the nonverbal response mode for only the youngest children. These results suggest selective attention-activation bias and/or hemispheric processing limitations for younger learning disabled children.

Adolescent

WAIS-R scores as predictors of employment success and failure among adults with learning disabilities.

The transition of adults with learning disabilities to successful employment is contingent upon numerous factors. Eighty-six adults (55 males and 31 females), 18 to 59 years old (mean age 26.7 years), with learning disabilities were evaluated clinically using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R) (Wechsler, 1981) to determine the value of WAIS-R IQs and subtest scores in predicting successful employment. Significant relationships were identified between subjects' WAIS-R IQs and scaled scores and job success. Conclusions and recommendations were reported.

Adolescent

Hair element content in learning disabled children.

Hair samples from 31 learning disabled and 22 normal children were analyzed for content of 14 elements. Significant group differences were determined and a discriminant function was completed which separated the groups with 98 per cent accuracy. Elevated lead and cadmium content in the learning disabled group is viewed as being of particular importance.

Cadmium

Spelling rule usage among students with learning disabilities and normally achieving students.

Spelling performance of students with learning disabilities (LD) was compared with that of same-age normally achieving subjects and younger normally achieving subjects. Subjects with learning disabilities were divided into two groups: poor readers/poor spellers and good readers/poor spellers. A spelling battery was administered that included one task of phoneme-grapheme correspondence rule usage and four tasks of suffix rule usage. The groups with learning disabilities performed significantly below the same-age normally achieving group on all tasks. No significant differences among the two groups with learning disabilities and their achievement-level peers emerged in primary analyses. However, secondary analyses revealed differences in mastery of the past tense spelling rule ed, and in some subskills related to the spelling of words with suffixes. The cognitive-linguistic significance of these results is discussed.

Child

Social effects of integrated classrooms and resource room/regular class placements on elementary students with learning disabilities.

The social status of elementary students with learning disabilities (LD) served by the Integrated Classroom Model (ICM) was compared to the social status of elementary students with learning disabilities served in a regular class with resource room support. The ICM serves elementary special education and non-special-education students (1:2) together as one class. The comparison group was composed of students with learning disabilities who received special education services outside of their regular classroom for a portion of their school day. Social status was determined by assessing interpersonal relationships among students, using a peer rating method. The results of analyses of various dimensions suggest that while special education students in both programs have significantly lower social status on average than their non-special-education peers, the children in the ICM have a better opportunity to blend successfully into the classroom than the children who go out to a resource room.

Child

Variables influencing phonemic discrimination performance in normal and learning-disabled children.

Twenty-five learning-disabled and 25 normal first-grade-age children took a phonemic discrimination test that manipulated word-pairs systematically according to degree of phonetic difference, position of phoneme contrast, and lexical familiarity. Results indicated that (1) the significantly lower performance of the learning-disabled to children as a group was due to the impaired performance by a small subgroup, (2) all three stimulus variables had significant effects on performance, (3) all combinations of stimulus variables interacted significantly, and (4) discrimination performance did not correlate with measures of receptive vocabulary or reading achievement for either group.

Achievement

Effectiveness of aides in a perceptual motor training program for children with learning disabilities.

A program for children with learning disabilities associated with perceptual deficits was designed that included elements of gross and fine motor coordination, visual and somatosensory perceptual training, dance, art, music and language. The effectiveness of nonprofessional "perceptual-aides," who were trained in this program, was evaluated. Twenty-eight children with learning disabilities associated with perceptual deficits were treated by occupational, physical, recreational and language therapists; and 27 similarly involved children were treated by two aides, under supervision, after training by therapists. Treatment in both groups was for four hours weekly over a four to seven month period. There was significant improvement in motor skills, visual and somatosensory perception, language and educational skills in the two programs. Although there was no significant difference between the two groups, there was a slight advantage to the aide program. The cost of the aide program was 10 percent higher than the therapist program during the first year, but 22 percent lower than the therapist program during the second year.

Allied Health Personnel

Nationwide survey of postsecondary education services for students with learning disabilities.

Postsecondary services for students with learning disabilities vary a great deal from campus to campus, and published guides to postsecondary education services are often inaccurate and incomplete. A nationwide survey was conducted to investigate student service provisions in 2-year colleges and 4-year colleges and universities. The purpose of the study was to identify and catalog postsecondary education service goals and options for students with learning disabilities, and to determine differences between the goals service providers have for these students and services actually provided. The findings and their implications for service providers at both high school and college levels are discussed.

Data Collection

The relationship between occupational therapy and physical therapy test scores in children with learning disabilities.

Twenty-seven children with learning disabilities associated with perceptual deficits were studied in order to determine what relationship might exist between occupational therapy and physical therapy test scores. Intercorrelations were computed and multivariate models were developed for the occupational therapy test items. Numerous positive relationships were demonstrated between the two groups of test items, consistent with previous clinical and experimental data. One test, however, did not duplicate the other, and both are essential in the evaluation of the learning-disabled child with perceptual deficits. Negative correlations also emerged, which might have been caused by compensation for deficits.

Child